THE IMPORTANCE OF BRAND IDENTITY

Every company in this world needs brand identity design! If you look around you, there are logos everywhere: from the moment you wake up and wash your teeth you have the tooth paste logo, the floss logo, the coffee maker logo, the fridge logo and so on. So why is branding important? Did it ever happen to you to buy something based on your perceived value of that product rather than its actual value? It’s all about the right branding and how to create the perceived value we want for a product.

If you see a logo time and time again and you remember it, you recognize it, you associate it with the company, that means that you are starting to grow trust on that product and you might even go and buy it, over and over again. It’s like adding a face to a name – that’s what logos do: they help you remember your experience with a company.

HERE ARE SOME POINTERS IN CREATING A TIMELESS LOGO DESIGN:

LESS IS BETTER

Let’s start with a question. What is more likely for you: to remember a simple logo design or a complex one, with many elements? You might say that a more complex design is more special, creative but the truth is that even the simplest logo design can be creative.

Why less is better? Because you have to think practical. Simplicity is the key word in logo design because it helps it to be more versatile. You can use it more easily on all sort of media such as business cards, pin badges, billboards or even as a favicon. A simple logo is also much easier to remember and recognize, achieving a timeless quality.

RELEVANCE

I think it’s common sense that your logo design must be relevant to the industry, the client and the audience to which you are aiming. You can’t design a summer flower as a logo for a ski shop or a snowflake for a summer-holiday travels TV channel. To achieve relevance, you need to do your research on your client and the business.

Don’t get it wrong though, the logo you are designing doesn’t have to literally reveal what the company is about. Just think about the BMW logo – it isn’t a car.

TRADITION

When creating a logo and brand identity, you must leave trends to the fashion industry. You want to create a timeless logo design for your client and trends come and go like the wind. While you are doing your research on the company, try to find out which are the values, the symbols that best represent that business. Try to incorporate one such element in the design if it’s possible.

DISTINCTION

This is the tough part. How do you make a distinctive logo, one that you can easily separate from all that competition? A distinctive logo is characterized by unique style or quality which best portrays the company’s business perspective. The way to do it is to concentrate on a design that is recognizable. Think in shapes, work in black and white – the contrast will help you emphasize the idea.

MEMORABLE

A timeless logo design is one that viewers will remember after just one glance. Just imagine that the logo will be on a poster in a subway station, on a bus, in the window of a shop – it only gets a quick look, that’s all the time your logo has to make an impression.

Think about the logos that you remember the most. Put down on paper what are the characteristics that made them ingrained in your memory. It also helps to downsize the time you spend on drawing/sketching the idea – if you spend 30 minutes on drawing for it, how to you expect viewers to remember it in just a quick glance?

THINK SMALL

Think about the use of that logo. It may be used on billboards, but it also may be used on smaller things, such as clothing labels, zipper pulls and business cards. This will also save the client a significant amount of money on printing costs, potential redesign and even more – simplicity is the key. This also increases the chances of creating a logo design that will last.

ONE THING

If you want your design to last and to stand apart from the crowd, incorporate only one feature. When you have only one glance from the viewer, the more elements you have on your logo, the bigger the chances are that it will not be remembered.

In early May, the call for entries for A Logo for Human Rights (LHR), a “global creative online competition with cash prizes and open to everyone,” was announced. The goal? To “create a human rights logo ‘by people for people’, thus making a contribution towards the global spread and implementation of human rights with the support of a large public.” The process was your typical contest malarkey: People design, people upload, people vote on uploaded logos, designers e-mail friends and family to vote for their logos, participants complain about the voting process, the top 100 vote getters get presented to the jury(Spiekermann! Ai WeiWie! Jimmy Wales! Jimmy Carter!) and the “experts” (No! Idea! Who! They! Are!), the jurors select their own favorite ten logos, of those top vote getters ten finalists are presented again for online public voting, participants complain about the selection process, finalists designers e-mail friends and family to vote for their logos, a winner is announced. On Friday, LHR announced that Serbian designer Predrag Stakic had been selected as the winner from over 15,000 submissions.

What do you know? The result is not bad. It’s easy to mock it or denounce it as the offspring of the evil process of a contest, but if you look at the two concept images above — the kids drawing their hands not that much more difficult than doing a handprint turkey and the image of protesters holding their open hand in the air — the logo has the potential to find lasting power. There is something weird about the way the thumb breaks into the dove and the dove has some mighty big feathers, but as a simple mark that could be adopted by a lot of people it works remarkably well. But it’s all potential and maybes right now with this logo — its real success depends on whether people across the world use it.